Stephen Levine: The people have spoken, but what did they say?

Stephen Levine

Whenever an election takes place it is said that the people have spoken. This was true on Saturday, too: the people have spoken, but what have they said?

The result thus far is the very opposite of what elections in this country are all about.

As Prime Minister Helen Clark has said, the objective is stable government, and we have at this stage very little of that. The Prime Minister will try to form a minority government, no doubt beginning with Jim Anderton and Peter Dunne and backed up by support arrangements with the Greens and New Zealand First. She may well succeed. Don Brash will be hoping that she fails. In 1996 Jim Bolger outmanoeuvred Clark in coalition negotiations and Brash will be trying to do the same.

With 10 per cent of the vote still to be counted - special votes, including 25,000 ballots cast overseas - the election remains a work in progress. Even in Tauranga there is uncertainty, with no admission of defeat from Winston Peters and the possibility of a legal challenge.

We are not used in New Zealand to election nights in which victory goes unclaimed and party leaders fail to concede defeat gracefully. In this case, with National still hopeful and the outcome of Helen Clark's consultations uncertain, a long campaign is to be followed by a difficult and perhaps protracted aftermath. While Clark and Brash will be happy with any sort of result that places them in power, a result so evenly divided leaves neither of them with a very clear mandate.

This result follows an election campaign filled with bizarre events - has a political leader anywhere in the world ever had to publicly admonish his colleagues not to talk about their testicles? - but it does show evidence of sobriety and self-restraint among the electorate.

It is surely a sign of maturity that a sequence of historic All Black victories offered no advantage to Labour, as voters refused to take their eyes off the ball to exchange the promise of substantial tax cuts for the transient feelgood factor of rugby sporting success.

Helen Clark's more transparent attempts to associate Michael Campbell's golfing prowess with her own Government's performance also proved to no avail.

This election - our fourth under MMP - brings us closer to first-past-the-post two-party politics than for some time.

In 1996 National and Labour together won 62 per cent of the party vote and 81 seats. Three years later they managed 69 per cent of the vote and 88 seats, but the 2002 election saw National and Labour back on 62 per cent - a product of National's dismal performance - with 79 seats between them.

This time around, the two major parties were able together to capture 81 per cent of the vote - four out of every five votes - winning 99 seats in Parliament. That party vote dominance extends to the electorates, with National and Labour taking 59 of the 62 general electorates - every one, apart from Rodney Hide's, Peter Dunne's and Jim Anderton's.

Our three previous MMP elections saw many New Zealand voters turning their backs on the two larger parties, giving politicians from smaller political movements opportunities to find influence in Parliament and around the Cabinet table. The 2005 election, however, shows New Zealanders getting over their flirtation with the pleasures of multi-party politics.

The campaign was dominated throughout by the two leaders, Clark and Brash - their fitness to govern, their leadership skills, their trustworthiness.

The debate over policies similarly revolved almost exclusively around what National and Labour had to offer. There was little that was novel or fresh in the promises and programmes of the smaller parties. Interest in them was almost exclusively confined to whether they would survive, and what role they might play as potential appendages to governments led by either Labour or National. That continues now, as various coalition scenarios are contemplated.

This, therefore, was in many ways a two-party election, but one taking place under MMP rules. The smaller parties performed poorly, their representation in the new Parliament significantly reduced from 2002. Only the Maori Party, with its four seats, can claim victory and vindication.

Its wins in four electorates come at a price. New Zealanders uncomfortable with a 120-seat Parliament will be dismayed with the overall results, having discovered that the number of elected politicians has now gone up even further. The arcane overhang result - a party gaining more seats than it was entitled to by its share of the party vote - will please very few. In 1999 more than 80 per cent of voters approved a non-binding referendum question calling for Parliament to be reduced to 99 members. That referendum was ignored by the incoming Clark Government. Now, six years later, New Zealanders find out that what can't go down can go up, as the number of MPs rises to 122.

This resulted from the Maori Party's success in the Maori seats, and may put even more pressure on those electorates. Many New Zealanders have already shown themselves attracted to the idea that these seats can be simply legislated away. That these seats were responsible for a little-understood feature of MMP leading to still more MPs must only make them a further irritant.

All in all, this election brings about a very different Parliament.

National went into the election with only 27 MPs. Its new, enlarged caucus will be a mix of the bemused and the bewildered, led, at times, by the befuddled.

But National's success at the polls, nearly doubling its vote from 2002, suggests it would be unwise to count out the Brash team yet.

Whether for good or for ill, we live in interesting times. Whichever coalition government is formed, there will be many spectacles in store for us. It remains to be seen whether stable, competent, and effective government is one of them.

* Stephen Levine is Professor of Political Science at Victoria University of Wellington.